Each week in Bookends, two writers take on questions about the world of books. “A weekend is a much bigger character than Watergate,” Wilfrid Sheed said. This week, Thomas Mallon and Francine Prose debate whether grand historical events are better fodder for fiction than everyday life.

By Thomas Mallon

Why shouldn’t we accommodate the clamor of history along with the murmurings of its bystanders?

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Thomas MallonCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Sheed’s observation is a bit of ­metonymy meant to elaborate on a stated preference for novels about the private “John Cheever world” over ones taking place amid the headlined public history of John Dos Passos’ fiction. Sheed was expressing what has been the established literary sensibility for more than a century, the one that directs us to prefer, aesthetically and even ethically, the lively inner life of Clarissa Dalloway to the flat, outer one represented by the star guest at her party: “The Prime Minister? . . . He looked so ordinary. You might have stood him behind a counter and bought biscuits — poor chap, all rigged up in gold lace.”

Sheed himself knew that the ­weekend-versus-Watergate question wasn’t an either-or matter. Several years before making the remark we started with, he marveled over the still unfolding Watergate scandal for being itself a kind of novel whose unknown author “moves with ease from the twittering of minor functionaries to the brutal swagger of the high command.” And indeed, why shouldn’t fiction be able to accommodate the clamor of public history along with the murmurings of its bystanders? Do the maneuverings of Napoleon’s army and those of Becky Sharp ever seem disproportionate in “Vanity Fair”? Not to me.

As the author of a novel actually called “Watergate,” I suppose I should speak up for the view that opposes Sheed’s “weekend” inclination. But I would still rather argue that we have a false choice here. If anything, my “Watergate” ended up containing more “weekend” matter than the public stuff one can find in The Washington Post. The characters’ bumblings, regrets and private motives — so often at odds with anything one might deduce from their public conduct — dominate the book. Pat Nixon, and the largely unknown “bagman” Fred LaRue, both impelled by secret, past affections, are as much the heart of the novel as the president, and even he is seen mostly from the inside out. The hardcover edition had a perforated dust jacket that invited readers to lift it up and see some wires lying beneath the telephone receiver it depicted. For all its wit, I worried that this jacket made the book look like a political thriller with a juggernaut plot, and I ended up preferring what went onto the paperback: a small photograph of the Nixons sharing a private moment, the first lady whispering in the president’s ear and Nixon shyly cupping her elbow.

Trollope, a half-century before “Mrs. Dalloway,” suffered from none of modernism’s reverse snobbery when it came to imagining an inner life for his prime minister, Plantagenet Palliser. This leader of the nation has only recently been looking forward to “the tranquillity of retirement,” but when his coalition government begins to collapse and thus hasten his reward, the “poison of place and power and dignity” compel him to fight for a job he no longer even wants. His inner life is quite as vibrant, in its way, as Clarissa Dalloway’s, and the social complications of an entertainment at his estate no less intricate than those of any “weekend” in the novels of Cheever, or Jane Austen. As Palliser’s wife explains: “We asked Mr. Rattler, . . . but he declined, with a string of florid compliments. When Mr. Rattler won’t come to the Prime Minister’s house, you may depend that something is going to happen. It is like pigs carrying straws in their mouths.”

If most current political fiction could be improved by having less in the way of plot (“House of Cards,” in all its British and American versions, would be even more absorbing with a lower homicide rate), the “weekend” sensibilities of most literary fiction could do with some infusion of the big public events against which we also live our lives. This proposal may itself sound like political horse-trading, but the middle ground is sometimes occupied more from conviction than convenience.

Thomas Mallon’s eight novels include “Henry and Clara,” “Bandbox,” “Fellow Travelers” and “Watergate,” a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also published nonfiction about plagiarism (“Stolen Words”), diaries (“A Book of One’s Own”), letters (“Yours Ever”) and the Kennedy assassination (“Mrs. Paine’s Garage”), as well as two books of essays. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications. A recipient of the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for distinguished prose style, he is currently professor of English at George Washington University.

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By Francine Prose

What about the novels that make us forget that there are such things as a weekend, or Watergate?

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Francine ProseCreditIllustration by R. Kikuo Johnson

Every so often, a critic or writer publishes an essay saying that a novel isn’t worth reading unless it portrays a historical event on a scale that’s the literary equivalent of Imax: huge screen, sweeping panorama, disparate neighborhoods, distant countries, warring social classes. Then another essayist asks, “But what about ‘Mrs. Dalloway’? A London woman buys flowers and gives a party, and, oh yes, a shellshocked veteran kills himself. No Watergate there, not even much of a weekend. But that’s a novel, right?” And then a third critic says, “The duty of the novelist is to reinvent the novel, to dispense with traditional forms and shake up narrative like dice in a cup. Weekend? Watergate? All that matters is language and form.”

People seem to enjoy these discussions — taking sides, defending their positions, insulting their fellow writers. But I always think, Couldn’t they be doing something more pleasurable? Like, for example, reading a novel?

When we open a novel or a story that we’ve never read, we come to it — consciously or not — with a set of questions. The first and most obvious is: “What are you?” Shouldn’t that question be open-ended, just in case the novel is (as we might hope) unlike anything we have read before? It’s unhelpful and reductive to ask of a book: “Are you Watergate or weekend? Are we about to witness a clandestine break-in, or yet another family tormenting one another over Christmas dinner?”

We can think of beloved books that we might classify as weekend in that they focus on events that affect only the principal characters. Dezso Kosztolanyi’s great novel “Skylark” takes place during one week in which a young woman leaves her sleepy Hungarian backwater to visit relatives. By the time she returns, she and her parents are so devastated by what her absence has revealed about their little family that they might have survived a brutal military campaign. The tender emotions that animate Barbara Pym’s novels will never appear in a history book, and yet we cannot doubt that she is describing major turns in the lives of her heroines.

If we are using Watergate as shorthand for history, a brief perusal of our bookshelves will turn up dozens of novels and stories that include (or refer to) important events, from Tolstoy’s portrayal of the Battle of Borodino in “War and Peace” to Stendhal’s depiction of Waterloo in “The Charterhouse of Parma,” from Don DeLillo’s portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald in “Libra” to Deborah Eisenberg’s “Twilight of the Superheroes,” among the best works of fiction to address the Sept. 11 attacks.

But are the events in these works “better fodder” for fiction than those in “Remembrance of Things Past”? Admittedly, Proust’s masterpiece spans decades, and charts a great deal of social change. But mostly it gives us small moments: country lunches, parties, love affairs blighted by jealousy.

What makes the question even harder to resolve is that so many excellent novels are neither Watergate nor weekend — or are both. Roberto Bolaño’s “2666” starts with a long spell of weekend (an academic love triangle) and then gets very Watergate, very fast, as it moves to the United States-Mexico border, and from there to World War II Europe. Henry Green’s “Loving,” set among the servants on an Anglo-Irish estate, is consistently low-key — and yet we (like the novel’s characters) are only briefly allowed to forget that a war is raging in the skies just across the Irish Sea. And how shall we resolve the question when we consider novels — Robert Walser’s “Jakob von Gunten,” Jane Bowles’s “Two Serious Ladies” — that make us forget that there are such things as a weekend, or Watergate?

Ultimately, what matters is not whether the quotidian or the historic provides better “fodder” for a novel, but rather what the novelist does with that raw material: how the writer transforms the stuff of life — the singular or the repetitive, the everyday or the dramatic — into art.

Francine Prose is the author of 20 works of fiction and nonfiction, among them the novel “Blue Angel,” a National Book Award nominee, and the guide “Reading Like a Writer,” a New York Times best seller. Her new novel is “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.” Currently a distinguished visiting writer at Bard College, she is the recipient of numerous grants and awards; a contributing editor at Harper’s, Saveur and Bomb; a former president of the PEN American Center; and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

A version of this article appears in print on , Page 31 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Are Grand Historical Events Better Fodder for Fiction Than Everyday Life?. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe